A Wisconsin Yankee in Walt Disney's Court

I should probably be last person allowed to review serious fiction; I rarely read novels anyway, and even movies and TV shows annoy me anymore. I can’t wrap my head around something that somebody just made up, or get myself to care. The sudden realization why came to me one day when I was with a group of people watching Dragonball Z, several of them out of their seats and nearly jumping up and down with excitement. “I can’t believe he’s that powerful!” one screamed as gigantic monsters pounded each other, and the thought instantly came into my head: This is why I can’t watch Star Trek. I’m not like these people. I make exceptions for a few things here and there, like Herman Melville or corny old comic books. Generally, though, if it’s not funny I’m not interested.
But I picked up a copy of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay after hearing a little about it and seeing the author’s guest appearance on The Simpsons. Michael Chabon can’t be such a bad guy, right? I’d heard it was about the early days of the comic book industry, and the work of Jewish cartoonists who pretty much invented the whole super-hero genre. It turns out that that’s almost an aside in this long, long novel, more about Jewish culture and the Holocaust and its affect on the characters than comic books.
The protagonists, a couple of young cousins, one recently smuggled out of Czechoslovakia, create a super-hero called The Escapist and are pretty much ripped off, ala the two kids who created Superman. In a high-falutin’ novel like this, though, there’s much dense symbolism involved: The Escapist represents the artist, who escaped from the Nazis, and was conveniently trained as an escape artist as a younger man, still working to help his family escape; but also, the escapism of comic books in general, as well as the cousins’ and other characters’ own escape from reality. If it’s not obvious enough, the atrist’s magician outfit looks like The Escapist’s costume, just to grind the point home. The other character, the writer, whose real last name is Klayman, is paralleled with the Golem (get it?) of Jewish mythology, the protector, who makes an early appearance and replaces him near the end of the book.
OK, I can buy all that, and it’s intertwined pretty interestingly, but I can’t understand why, in a book that deals with such a dark subject, there’s so much more unnecessary death thrown in. I remember talking with someone about one of those ‘a meteor is going to hit the earth and kill us all’ movies a few years back which starts out with the astronomer who first spots the object careening off a road to his death in his haste to alert the authorities. OK, so he didn’t have a phone up in the observatory, maybe, but it seemed like a plot device to delay the discovery of the asteroid until it was too late. Except that they find his data in his mangled car the next day. Why? Isn’t killing thousands of people off enough? What was this scene for? Are there members of the audience so bloodthirsty that they need death and mayhem to tide them over until the inevitable disaster?
Well, this thing is the same way. Before the Nazis really start to crack down hard back home, the artist’s father dies out of the blue. After an elaborate series of events to smuggle his brother home, the ship is sunk by a German torpedo on the way over. Sure, a German boat will take the children aboard and save them. But a freak storm rears up and kills all the lifeboats full of refugees. Even, as Casey Kasem would put it, the goddamn dog dies in the most contrived Old Yeller scenario possible, and that’s after 20 other dogs and a dozen people die in a freak accident. An appendix bursts with no warning. A German soldier is shot and killed… accidentally. The old aunt is bought a nice retirement home (after grandma dies in her sleep) and dies of boredom within a few days. Someone else heads off to war and dies. I’m sure there’s more.
It’s almost unfair to make fiction about the Holocaust (or children dying, for that matter); what thinking person isn’t going to have a sympathetic mindset about it and automatically be drawn into the drama and the horror of it all? Jerry Lewis may be the only filmmaker who’s ever blown it. But why make it worse? Why does everything have to be so negative anymore? I don’t even see it as a World According to Garp sort of string of unfortunate events, just because it’s such extreme overkill, and there’s no possibility of a dark comic side to it, in this context.
The rest of the book is the usual series of Shakespearean coincidences that annoyed me on Three’s Company but are somehow considered Your Sure Sign Of Quality Literature, and a bizarre leap of ten years, the pretense of which doesn’t make any sense except to include the Seduction of the Innocent hoopla into the storyline’s contrite comic history. Between it all, though, there are dozens of characters painted in a possibly too-complete, too-lush but fascinating way, and above all a well-researched and loving description of New York in the late ‘30s and ‘40s that makes me yearn for a past that I never lived in, the way that Ben Katchor’s comics do. These parts kept me hanging on until the end. Oh, to have seen the 1938 World’s Fair, or the Empire State Building when it was shiny and new, and before terrorist threats ruined the experience (but the threat of air raids didn’t). There’s also some colorful language, maybe idiosyncrasies of the time, that fascinate me. Tosspot is one great word I’ve never seen in use. I wanted to research the use of a certain C word which I’ve seen an old lady walk out of a Scrabble tournament over, which was used in almost a romantic way, but I didn’t want to see what would come up on the Google when I typed that in.
Of course, everyone smoked in that time period. It seems like every old picture of a cartoonist hunched over the drawing board has a cigarette or cigar hanging out of their mouth, and I kind of got sick of descriptions of it. Most of them weren’t very flattering: everybody’s described by the smell or the stains on their fingers, ashes are dropped in food as it’s cooked, or a woman who finds out she’s pregnant and first things first, she’s heading out to buy a pack of Pall Malls. Ugh. It seemed liked a running gag after 500 pages, but I suppose it’s realistic.
But most of my complaints are personal hang-ups. I’m sick of super-heroes for the most part, anyway, and any other form of cartooning is given the short shrift. EC comics get a nod, newspaper cartoonists are Bad Guys of sorts, and funny animal comics are sneered at. Romance comics do play a small part in the latter part of the book, now that I think of it. In the condensed history of comics presented, the ending of the book leaves off heading into a new era of high brow funny books that really wouldn’t come along until the ‘70s at least, and would never really matter in the grand scheme of things. To top it off, the ripped off artists end up owning their publisher by the last page, utterly unlike anything that happened to the real Superman creators or anyone else in the field. It’s an alternate world that would’ve been nice, I must admit. What if Lee & Kirby didn’t revive super-heroes ten years after they seemed to have been doomed by Fredric Wertham? That seems to be an implied What If? in the book, but really it’s a condensation of Will Eisner’s career (the Brave New Comic the character’s are developing is described as having Spirit-like splash panels with the title lain out in an imaginative way), alluding to Eisner’s much later graphic novel work. A more interesting scenario might’ve been ‘What if Wertham was shot down, or ignored?’, and the EC influence would have taken hold in a comic industry that wasn’t crippled by paranoia.
In the end, it’s beautifully written dreck, worth the read for the history that’s in there, the graphic, flowery prose, and the anecdotes about the early cartoonists. So that’s most of the book, admittedly. I’d like to know more about which stories came from whom; I know much of it is based on Eisner, Kirby, and Seigal and Shuster, and Gill Kane and Stan Lee actually appear as characters. I’m sure some fans somewhere have annotated the whole book as far as who did what. I might find out that all the extraneous death and hardship in the novel actually befell a single one of these guys, and I’ll feel worse for it, but I can’t imagine that to be the case.